Kurosawa Centennial March 23

One of the most influential film makers, Akira Kurosawa, will be celebrated at film houses next month, with centennial showings of his movies.

Even if you've never heard of Kurosawa, you've probably seen movies that copied his in part or whole. His Seven Samurai was remade as The Magnificent Seven, which in turn spawned The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone and most recently, Inglorious Bastards. (Video clips from Ran are embedded at the bottom of this post.)

Kurosawa's Yojimbo was remade as Sergio Leone's western A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood, and Geoge Lucas acknowledged that The Hidden Fortress influenced Star Wars, including the robotic characters R2-D2 and C-3PO.  Rashomon was remade as a Paul Newman western, The Outrage.

Rashomon has even become a figure of speech, as in "Our movie is a rashomon," meaning the story comprises multiple points of view.

(For the linguistically-obsessive, I'd argue rashomon is an example of metonymy, while others would call it a synecdoche (thanks to blogger Ehkzu) not to be confused with the movie Synecdoche, New York {bad joke})

Rashomon re-tells through flashbacks the story of an attack and murder through the widely varying accounts of four witnesses and a medium, the deadman. Each story is mutually contradictory. Japanese audiences and critics were apparently shocked by some scenes (read here). Kurosawa reportedly made Rashomon on a budget of a measly $5,000. Yet he incorporated so much editing, lighting and cuts his command of the medium influenced directors for decades. 

Still, I wouldn't recommend Rashomon for most viewers today; the aging b&w video is rough and the subtitles could be a challenge with this complex story incorporating flashbacks within flashbacks.

 A more accessible film is Kurosawa's 1985 recasting of Shakespeare's King Lear as the samurai tale of filial betrayal Ran. There is a good re-issue of the Ran DVD by Criterion. The first time I saw the battle scene on a friend's laser disc I was stunned. Arrows fly like hail and the battlefield is covered with smoke -- all compressed with telephoto lenses to the point of claustrophobia. I felt more inside this battle than in the 3D of Avatar. Kurosawa built a castle at the foot of Mt. Fuji just to burn it down for this scene. 

I captured two clips of the battle scene, although streaming video doesn't do it justice. There is a 3:40 minute version for the ADD-impaired among you < g >, and a nearly ten minute version follows. Some explanation: A feudal leader tries to retire gracefully, but is betrayed by his own sons. My short clip starts when one of the sons is shot in battle, giving more power to the others. 

Near the beginning of the longer clip, the lord breaks his sword in battle and thus can not commit seppuku, which condemns him to wandering homeless in the wilderness for a long portion of the movie. (Use four-arrow-icon should you wish to view the video in a larger window.)

Ran: The Battle Scene, short version

 

 Ran longer battle scene:

Comments

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Talk about timing: I read this post within minutes after arriving home from a screening of "Ran" at Film Forum in New York, having viewed it with a friend who'd never seen it before.

I hadn't seen it since it first came out, but it held up really well. The print quality was amazing, too, and this is definitely a movie that benefits from a big screen (if available).

People associate Kurosawa with action scenes, but one of my favorites of his is the low-key "Ikiru," about a civil servant who learns he is dying and tries to make a difference in his neighborhood before he dies. Takashi Shimura gives a great performance. Some may find it too sentimental, but I never get tired of it.

[Ehkzu]

I've seen nearly all of his movies, from "Judo Saga" (1943) forward.

Some notes:
What makes Kurosawa extraordinary is his combination of head and heart. Orson Welles was brilliant but pretty heartless. All those Hollywood "issue" films are heart-y but offensively didactic.

Kurosawa only slipped when it came to nukes. He was kind of obsessed about getting nuked--not uncommon among Japanese for some reason, I suppose. Who knew?

Thus, Kurosawa's "Dreams," a set of short films with some relationships between them, is generally brilliant--except for a couple so segments about getting nuked, which are both didactic and generally uninteresting.

A note on "Ran"--I can't comment on the use of language in Kurosawa's version of "King Lear," but the plotting of K's version is actually superior to Shakespeare's original. I won't say more, because I want to avoid spoilers, but the revelation--shortly followed by an enraged decapitation--near the end of the film provides a profound "aha" moment. And the final image of the film is as eloquently sorrowful as it gets.

And those who've only seen his epics--like "Ran" in color and "Seven Samurai" in B&W--should know that his more intimate films, like "No regrets for our youth" or "Do-des-ka-den" are also highly worthy.

But it helps to know something about Japanese culture and history. I watched "Kagemusha" in an American theater. It's a fact-based historical epic set in the late 1500s. There's a scene when Nobunaga Oda learns that Shingen Takeda has been killed. He jumps up and sings and moves through a stylized Japanese court dance, waving a fan. Many in the audience laughed. For them it was like watching General Patton try his hand at ballet. But I was embarrassed for them. It was a song about the transitory nature of fame/success, and a profound commentary that contextualized Oda's moment of triumph.

Likewise there was a scene in the same movie when Oda gets someone to try wine. Oda's quite enamored of Western stuff, which was just starting to penetrate Japan. The other guy spits it out, though. He's Tokugawa, the author of Japan's eventual withdrawl from nearly all international contact for 250 years. So the moment of his spitting out the wine means a lot more than it might seem to the ignorant viewer.

Lastly, the new TV comedy series "Parks and Recreation" appears to have been inspired by "Ikiru." I found that fascinating.